MORE AND MORE I REALIZE I'VE NEVER BEEN

MORE AND MORE I REALIZE I’VE NEVER BEEN

More and more I realize I’ve never been

who I thought I was when I was nineteen

to sixty-five, but to believe I did was

a useful delusion to get things going until now.

It’s a mask to rub the mask off your face

and say you’ve improved the complexion

of the moon. You have to include your wrong

in your right, your ugliness in your beauty,

to be holistically accurate about being

nobody you’d care to meet as well

as somebody you can’t tear yourself away from.

Isn’t it so? Would you want to have a coffee

with you? Or would you make an excuse

and forgo the encounter? Or maybe

you’ve been dying to meet yourself for years?

Would you ask yourself for your own autograph?

Give somebody a crystal skull and a Nazca terraglyph

and they’ll come up with a meaning of life

that’s as good as anybody else’s good guess

except they heard it from an alien they were

listening in on like the NSA to a cellphone.

I was always a diamond in the rough

education, art, poetry, women and teachers

who marvelled at my anomaly, were

going to cut and polish every facet of

as if I were having crowns put on my fangs

like the first and last crescents of the moon,

and I don’t say they weren’t motivated by love,

for the most part, but enough was enough.

If you want diamonds that flash like the moon

on water, you’re going to have to put up

with the darkness of the ore they’re derived from.

Everybody’s the collapsed parachute

of how high they’ve fallen to ground, shooting star,

withered daylily in the autumn, dandelion

or milkweed seed trying to land on good soil,

some do, some don’t, but it once was

very different before they paved the starfields

and the comets had to root in the minds of humans

like comas and commas, rat tail combs

sticking out a back pocket, like a sign

of what could have been, with a precautionary warning

you can’t exorcise all the ghosts and still

have someone to live for. You can’t

white-wash a wanted poster over and somehow

pretend you’re in the clear. Sooner or later

you’ll catch up to yourself and shoot first

and ask questions later. You’ll hang with horse thieves

though you were only along for the ride.

There’s a force driving me like a spy satellite

around a shepherd moon to greener pastures

where I’ll graze among the stars like the first time

a man goes down on a woman to give her

as much pleasure as he’s possessed by

as the crumpled surf of the bedsheets

have to open at the same time for a safe descent.

Skydiving is an erotic experience. Time and again.

You see two snakes copulating and modesty

makes you go prophetically blind as a planet in transit

across the sun that shines at midnight, while the moon

opens flowers like loveletters on the sly.

It’s nice to be admired for the things you hope

you do well, but you’re never admired, except

by maybe one or two, for who you are if

somebody out of your mind not theirs were to ask you

about your masterpiece. The colours of

the Jurassic waterlilies don’t fade for

three hundred and fifty million lightyears,

but the grey on your head has gone to seed

with the Scotch thistles who once stood armed

and violet. The bones in your starmud

are scattered like a wetland of dead trees,

yarrow sticks of a moonrise in

the Book of Changes. Nine in the fifth place

will never be a nightclub where women

fight over you again. And you got to meet

the Byrds just as they found Jesus and the music

was never the same again. Here’s

to the tinny guitars of the sixties lest we forget.

Anybody remember what that was all about?

There was a boom of ghost towns we called ideals.

Revolution became a hot commodity on Wall Street

and it was a lot easier to sleep around like Leonard Cohen.

I didn’t believe all the flowers I saw

in everybody’s hair just as I don’t place

much faith in the flamethrowers that are the rage

of today. Eventually it all goes up in smoke.

It flares and dies away like a supernova.

Flowers grey, hair grey, and the dragons mere

warm breath on cold air. They ran out of natural gas.

Smoke, smoke, smoke, a chimney spark,

a firefly, a flash of lightning and then we

go into the dark like a poppy or a matchbook.

The savage rose is dry blood on the snow.

So what lasts? The colours of the lilies perhaps.

PATRICK WHITE